OF all of the Holden Commodores built and raced by Perkins Engineering there weren’t too many that didn’t tackle Mount Panorama on at least one occasion with Larry Perkins‘ team.
However, one of those cars that amazingly never tackled Bathurst with PE came back into focus at the recent RaceFuels Winton Festival of Speed.
Chassis PE 038 was in action at the popular retro/heritage event and is part of the collection of PremiAir Racing owner Peter Xiberras.
The drag racing champion jumped behind the wheel on-track at the Winton event; the car now runs in its 2001 Castrol Racing livery.
“There’s so much to learn, but I love learning, asking questions, ‘what did you do here, why are you so quick through that corner?’,” Xiberras told V8 Sleuth in June 2022 of driving this car and being out of his comfort zone compared to drag racing.
“I go drag racing to be competitive, whereas the circuit racing I go to have fun, enjoy time with good mates and steer these old cars that as a kid I’d watch on TV. That’s pretty cool.”
Larry Perkins raced the car in the 2001 Shell Championship Series, though it was rested from the Queensland 500 and Bathurst 1000 endurance races.
It became new signing Steve Richards’ car in 2002 as the #16 Castrol car, though was also rested from the two big endurance races in which Richards and Russell Ingall finished second in Ingall’s regular chassis renumbered as car #16.
The PE 038 chassis didn’t get to race at Bathurst in the ‘main game’ and took until 2004 to run around the Mountain in the Konica Minolta (now Super2) race with Jay Verdnik driving.
Xiberras has owned the car since 2019 and ran it at the Sydney Classic event in 2022 at Sydney Motorsport Park.
He also ran his Bob Jane T-Marts Commodore VK Group A car at the RaceFuels Winton Festival of Speed, handing the wheel over to Trans Am regular Elliot Barbour for the late Saturday afternoon race.
Barbour started the pit lane and drove through the field to finish third behind David Towe’s ex-JPS BMW M3 and Chris Stillwell’s ex-B&H Ford Sierra RS500 Cosworth.